The present invention generally relates to the field of software systems, and more specifically, to techniques for using statistics on link usage within the user interface of an application. The links to which the statistics pertain may be shortened links produced by a link-shortening service, or may also be unshortened links for which a shortened form has been created on some link-shortening service, or unshortened links for which no shortened form is known to have been created.
Users of the Internet frequently share links (e.g., URLs) related to content of interest. For example, a user might share a web page of interest with the user's friends by typing or pasting the web page's URL into an email; into a text message of a social networking or microblogging service, such as TWITTER; or into a message posting to be placed on the user's page on a social networking site, such as FACEBOOK.
The length of links often proves inconvenient for sharing purposes. For example, a URL having a lengthy domain name and/or path may be inadvertently broken across multiple lines when processed by email systems, thus rendering it incapable of being used directly when clicked on by a recipient of the email. Also, message sharing services, social networking sites, and other online messaging systems may impose maximum character requirements on a user's messages, thereby restricting the use of long URLs in a message. Furthermore, long URLs can appear indecipherable and intimidating to users, leading to user reluctance to click on them.
For these reasons, URL shortening services have been created to facilitate the shortening of URLs and the subsequent use thereof. A typical URL shortening service saves a mapping between an original unshortened URL and a shortened version thereof. When a user clicks a shortened URL, the user's computer obtains a page from the URL shortening service, which then redirects the user's computer to the original version of the URL that was associated with the shortened version.
The URL shortening services used to shorten the URLs also typically track statistics about the use of content such as web pages through the associated shortened URLs. For example, a URL shortening service might track how many times a particular web page was viewed via clicks on a particular shortened URL associated with the web page, or an aggregate number of times the web page was accessed via clicks on any of its shortened links, or the number of distinct times that the URL was shortened as a proxy for the number of people who shared the URL.
Statistics may be obtained for URLs—including unshortened URLs—in other ways, as well. These statistics constitute valuable information about the URLs and associated content to which they correspond, but the information is not currently leveraged to provide viewers of content with insights about the relevance of the associated content.